Apple Mulls Putting AirPlay Video Streaming Technology Inside Your TV

For some time, Apple has viewed its Apple TV device like stamp collecting – an interesting hobby. The concept is intriguing, but the real money could be made if there was a more direct connection to your living-room TV, hence analyst speculation the Cupertino, Calif. company might someday get into the TV business. That day could be sooner than expected amid a Wednesday report TV makers are considering putting key Apple TV technology inside new TV sets.

The technology, known as AirPlay currently streams video and audio from Apple devices, such as the iPad or iPhone, to the Apple TV set-top box. However, now TV manufacturers, looking for a way to revive slumping sales, are talking with Apple about putting the technology directly in new TVs.The possibility of TVs powered by Apple isn’t too far-flung. The technology is already being licensed to speaker makers for audio streaming. Bloomberg quotes a Pioneer executive calling the AirPlay video streaming “a blessing for an industry trying to move the needle forward on sales.

About the author:

Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.

Robert Pruitt

I think doing this could help establish AirPlay as a standard and I’d love to see that happen. I really love the technology behind it and how it allows me to interact with my portable electronics.

Fearless_fred

Well, there’s already plenty of TVs out there with streaming functionality, both from DLNA storage and direct from the ‘net. I got a 40″ Samsung LCD TV in October last year, and without any setting up, it was able to see the NAS I have on my network that I store video on, and was able to play it. direct. It’s also able to stream from the BBC iPlayer after about a two second buffer, even on the higher definition picture.

That said, I still love my two Apple TV Gen 2s that I have. Since they dropped the price to the £100 mark, I was able to justify the cost to myself. The one problem that is still lacking from the whole Apple TV experience is that you still need to have the iMac running *with iTunes open* to be able to stream to the Apple TV. I wish they could work it out so that you can either store your iTunes library on a NAS so you can stream without the Mac needing to be on…

Nikola Dachev

There will be such a “direct streaming link” technology on TVs sooner or later. Apple’s may be the one…